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I have never seen WW84, but from what I've read this picture was in the film. If that's so then I don't know what Patty Jenkins and Gal Gadot were thinking. They went from talking about how the original plan of Diana leaving humanity behind is supposedly going against the character - to have her do nothing and let the Holocaust happen? It doesn't make any sense.

Absolutely correct. They were totally tone deaf on handling this character with what was established from earlier. Totally embarrassing that someone actually photoshopped that picture. It's so frustrating that they threw away a terrific opportunity to have an immortal character like Diana be the wisest and most seasoned superhero living and fighting through atrocities throughout the 20th century and how certain events could make her hardened towards humanity and how people like Superman and Batman could convince her that people are worth saving. Instead, they got too focused on how glamorous Diana should be that just draws unwanted attention and how a superhero like her suffers because a cab will stop for a man instead of her.

I can see him doing comedic parts, but I don't know about the darker stuff.
Robin Williams proved he could do both.

Watch him in Inherent Vice.

The reason I say she's self-centred is because she puts her emotions ahead of the cause that Paul and the Fremen have been fighting for and abandons Muad'dib at a difficult time when he could've used her support. This is the opposite of what she does in the novel. In the novel she's hurt by Paul marrying Irulan, but she accepts it as a necessary political move to legitimise his claim to the throne. Just as Jessica accepted her status as concubine with Leto, so Chani makes this sacrifice to help facilitate Paul's ascendancy.

The deal is that Chani in the book and other adaptations makes her a doormat character with hardly any purpose at all but to serve this truly dated sensibility of women simply accepting their place made by men. The bit from the book made me cringe when I first read it, especially how it was the final words of the book. It's necessary adapting this material to 2024 audiences to include a voice of reason to the circumstances Herbert wanted to convey about blindly following a prophecy, despite good intentions, which was an issue he faced after the first book was written and had to reiterate in the later books.

In the novel Chani puts the cause they've been fighting for ahead of her own pride or emotional satisfaction. In the movie she publically abandons Paul and seemingly rejects him out of jealousy of Irulan.

She has every right to be emotional after being told repeatedly that Paul doesn't believe in the prophecy and condemns it for the same reasons she did, only wanting to help free her people from their oppressors, and ends doing exactly the opposite of what he said. Chani isn't storming out because she's scorn over being rejected for another woman. She's upset over him betraying everything he's said he wanted to be be and causing the billions of deaths that will occur. They just want to be left alone with their way of life, not be whisked away to another to likely die over the holy war that has been started.

It's one of those changes from the source material that wouldn't have bothered me if I hadn't read the books. It works in the context of Villeneuve's version of the story. But I find it inferior and less subtle than the way Herbert ended the story. Having Chani stoically accept her lot because she loves Paula and believes in him is, for me at least, far more moving than having her run away in a rather blunt display of emotionality. But ultimately the cinematic Chani is a different character from her literary namesake. She doesn't have faith in Paul or his cause and she doesn't stand by him at the end.

I've spent many years trying to understand the wide appeal of the Dune saga and I freely admit that elements like Chani being a doormat really turned me off from it. This new adaptation is much more satisfying and I look forward to what's next. A character like Chani is more relatable than the protagonist, especially if you're like me, and totally lose your relatability when he accepts his role as their role as their prophesies savior.

I've seen some fans speculating that Chani's reaction will impact the next film, seeing as one of the central conflicts in Dune Messiah is the rivalry between her and Irulan. Some are even predicting that the ending of Part 2 is positioning Chani as the central protagonist in the next movie. Chani plays a crucial role in Dune Messiah, but she isn't the book's protagonist. Paul might be an antihero, but Dune Messiah is still his story. We'll just have to wait and see how Villeneuve handles the adaptation.

I think everyone's biggest fear is that they want Chani to be the true Muad'Dib in this adaptation. Whether or not that's worse than making it actually rain on Arrakis is all down to execution. Really hope that it isn't that predictable and we'll get a decent third part to this story that isn't as disappointing as something like The Dark Knight Rises.

I don't find the novel dated. Dune is set 20,000 years in the future. The values and customs depicted in it were never meant to reflect those of our modern western society, but rather a feudalistic Imperium that has more in common with various medieval cultures.

Right, but in our present, audiences are more interested in subversions of that system than playing it as it was. It really is dated to have the most powerful women of Dune be witches nobody can trust and that says a lot about the author's beliefs, which is a whole other rabbit hole to dive into. Thankfully, these changes have helped make this story appealing enough to be as big of a success it is now at $500 million and climbing!

The movie depicts Chani as less emotionally mature and more self-centred than her literary counterpart, and the final scene robs her of her self-sacrificing stoicism in accepting Paul's political marriage to Irulan.

I fail to see how "self-centered" Chani was depicted in this adaptation. She was clearly defined as part of the Fremen who didn't believe in the prophecies and was driven by their own lifestyle. By the end, everyone who didn't believe was either dead or blindly converted by the circumstances that unfolded, as Lady Jessica wanted it to be. I didn't find Paul to be "emotionally mature" to be barging in on the Fremen council meeting for that matter. These were all decent changes for an updated adaptation of the story, compared to the rather dated material of the original, like said acceptance of Paul and Irulan's marriage.

The Baron's death is anticlimactic. In the Lynch version he gets slashed across the face with a Gom Jabbar, poisoned, has tubes ripped out of his chest that somehow sets his antigravity harness haywire, gets blasted out of a wall into a sandstorm and is eaten by a passing worm. Now that's how a villain should get his comeuppance. By contrast, he gets off easy in the new film. The fact Paul kills him instead of Alia could also impact a future adaption of Children of Dune, since the Baron's vengeful haunting of Alia is an important plot point in that story.

The Baron in the '84 is grotesque and over the top and gets a death that warrants that. This Baron is depicted as a dangerous mass of flesh, largely reminiscent of Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. His counterpart's death worked in that regard as well. It was very smart of Villeneuve to depict the character in this fashion, especially eliminating his pedophilic nature so that it wouldn't upset audiences seeing the only homosexual depicted in the series being represented by the villains. It also has been brought to light that Frank Herbert didn't take too kindly to his own homosexual son.

The whole absence of Alia is a result of the decision to streamline the story from years to months and was another welcome change that definitely leaves questions for how this will hopefully lead to the eventual sequels. They definitely are utilizing the laid out storylines of the books for these films instead of confining to just the individual books for their adaptations. The whole lineage of Lady Jessica with the Harkonnens came later on but was brought forth here.

Boy, this brings me back to when my brother first showed me Alex Ross artwork and it absolutely fueled my imagination on Marvel Comics translated to the big screen. I remember being so lit up when I first saw footage of Spider-Man web-swinging in the teaser. It looked EXACTLY like Marvels! My favorite one in the whole franchise is the final web-swing at the end of the first. Absolutely jaw dropping to this day! We're supposed to get a rerelease of the films next month in April and I can't wait to experience that scene again.

From what I saw, they seemed to have taken a lot of cues from the coffee table book called Gotham 1919-1939.

Some of the more interesting points I found talking with him... it seems that Kim Basinger & Jon Peters (or possibly Nicholson!) were probably the ones responsible for Alfred "letting Vicki into the cave." (My thoughts on that were that Alfred didn't let her in, that she had figured it out, but I digress).

The way I understood it with my research on the subject was that the scene was written to take place in Wayne Manor's study. I believe they went over schedule when it came to location shooting and they simply decided to pick it up in the Batcave.

Also it was surprising to hear that Tom Cruise had the part of Edward Scissorhands in the bag... then turned his back on it when Tim Burton said Edward was gay. 

That definitely seems the lot more frank than the usual excuse which was that Cruise simply asked too many questions about the character that didn't pertain to the movie, including how he goes to the bathroom and how he wanted him to be more assertive. Sometimes actors and directors don't want want to just say no to a project so they come up with difficult excuses why they don't want to do it so that the other person dismisses them.

Thank you very much for sharing this interview with us! I listened to the audiobook version of the interview Gems partook about the making of Mars Attacks and hoped we would have gotten some tidbits on his involvement with Batman, but there wasn't much on that subject. Glad you took the initiative to ask him about it.

I did notice a few discrepancies with his recollections. Gems criticized Hamm's script for being too much like Superman. That was the same criticism for Tom Mankiewicz's initial draft of Batman that Burton based his initial treatment on that he wrote with Julie Hickson. Also, Hamm stated that his initial pitch to Burton was to make Bruce Wayne just as insane as The Joker. It may be just a matter of misremembering details, like how Gems is under the impression that Edward Scissorhands was a Paramount movie instead of 20th Century Fox, but it is worth pointing out.

Thank you for being very thorough in asking these questions as we look forward to your conclusion!

It's funny. I've seen the SNL Superman's 50th Anniversary special a few times. But until now, I guess I didn't realize that the bald guy was always supposed to be Lex Luthor.

Strange.

In the credits of the special itself, Robert Smigel is listed as The Brainwave, not Lex Luthor. This was just a case of misidentification.

To answer the question posed in the title of the videos, Jeffrey Katzenberg'a infamous 1991 memo details that the reason Dick Tracy was concerned as a disappointment was that they spent just as much money marketing it as they did making it, severally narrowing the profits. Meanwhile, Pretty Woman only cost a faction of the budget of Dick Tracy and ended up outgrossing Batman worldwide, which was their goal with Dick Tracy. Beatty was pissed about being singled out for this and has sat on the property all of these decades out of spite it seems.